Farm bill shows true nature of Republicans

Monday

Jul 15, 2013 at 6:00 AMJul 15, 2013 at 6:29 AM

Clive McFarlane

Last week Congressional House Republicans once again showcased their callousness toward the poor when they finagled the passage of a farm bill stripped of its core component — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or what was formerly known as the food stamp program.

The House had earlier failed to pass another version of the bill that would have cut about $20 billion over the next 10 years from the program.

That proposed $20 billion cut, according to advocates for the poor, would have had a staggering impact on the approximately 50 million Americans who use the program to make ends meet.

Some of the more hardened House Republicans didn't think the cut was deep enough, and failing to get Democratic support to inflict even greater pain on the poor, they set aside the food stamp program with the intention of securing their draconian cuts at a later date.

House Republicans cannot fathom their shortsightedness in scuttling the food stamp program, which would have lifted 3.9 million Americans — including 1.7 million children — out of poverty if the benefits were included in the official measures of income and poverty in the 2010 Census, according to supporters of the program.

Indeed, House Republicans are not able to see what the USDA has known for a long time now — that the food stamp program "provides assistance to more low-income households during an economic downturn or recession and to fewer households during an economic expansion," and that the "rise in SNAP participation during an economic downturn results in greater SNAP expenditures which, in turn, stimulate the economy.

"When households spend their SNAP benefits, the direct effects are increased economic activity by the producers of the goods and services being purchased, as well as by the retail, wholesale and transportation system that delivers the goods and services," the USDA noted.

In addition, according to the USDA, every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates as much as $9 of economic activity, and every $1 billion in SNAP benefits creates approximately 9,000 full-time jobs.

Whether or not you agree with the USDA, it is difficult to side with the logic of the House Republicans. Their decision to strip the farm bill of the food stamp program would have been more palatable had they imbued the pared-down bill with just a little of their self-proclaimed fiscal conservatism.

Instead, they passed a bill loaded with largess for farmers, including increased crop insurance aid, and new subsidies for peanut, cotton and rice farmers.

This pared-down bill was even criticized by the conservative Heritage Foundation as "making sneaky changes ... so that some of the costliest and most indefensible (farm aid) programs no longer expire after five years, but will live on indefinitely."

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, noting that the pared-down bill benefits "mostly Republican states and interest groups," succinctly captured the scandalous behavior of House Republicans since President Barack Obama came into office.

"Without a vision of the common good, a party is basically just a faction, seeking only the interests of its constituents, with no sense of its responsibilities to the country as a whole," he wrote.

"And the Obama-era Republican Party's worst tendency has been toward just this sort of factionalism: Not an ideological extremism, exactly, but rather a vision of government that you might call 'small government for thee, but not for me,' in which conservatism is just constituent services for most reliable Republican groups and voters."